Whatever genes had been screwed up during their incubation, they’d clearly been bred to care for people. Skinner wondered why this particularly tendency hadn’t been bred into him. It confused him, the care and upkeep of other people’s inner selves. To his daughter and late son he must have seemed like a preoccupied bastard most of the time, hauling his bag of demons through his days. Whatever capacity for familial tenderness he’d possessed had been molded in war into a plethora of survival instincts. He imagined the only reason Waitimu had signed on as a contractor was because he felt it was expected of him. The boy should have gone into something constructive, like reverse- engineering a fallen city like Roon. Or something frivolous and ephemeral and vital, like poetry or music. But he’d followed his dad into the brutality business, the Darwinian industries, and unlike his lucky or unlucky old man, Waitimu hadn’t been saved by an angelic sniper perched on a rooftop.
As he stared out the window at the tottering fishbot it occurred to Skinner that he’d never questioned why there’d been so many attempts on his life. At the time, he’d chalked it up to eye-for-an-eye score settling from the last throes of the newman resistance. But why him and not Carl? Carl had offed just as many nooms… His head hurt. He fell asleep.
Soon Skinner could stand. He wobbled with 167 and 218 steadying him on either side. He could only stay upright for a minute or so but it was something. The little nanobots or whatever the hell they were were obviously working overtime in his spinal column. He wanted to walk through the field just beyond the window. He imagined his arms stretched out to either side, the feathery heads of waist-high grasses sweeping through his palms, catching their seed pods in the crooks between his fingers, the satisfying rip of seeds separating from stalks. The sun rose on the drizzly day that Skinner finally took his first steps. The clones let him walk about five feet before insisting that he sit again.
“Are they supposed to feel like my real legs?” Skinner asked.
“I don’t know,” 167 said. “I’ve never had to relearn how to use my legs.”
“Beats me,” 218 said. “The most extreme thing I’ve ever used this transmitter for was psoriasis.”
“What about your swollen left nut?” 167 said.
“Correction. And my swollen left nut.”
For the next three days, Skinner tried walking farther distances. At first he could rationalize the something- isn’t-right feeling as the simple weirdness of having to relearn how to walk. His legs jerked, twitched, flopped, kicked, and propelled him across the ground. After a week of regaining his strength, the sheer oddness of his gait wasn’t going away.
“What the hell,” Skinner said, shuffle-stepping then high-kicking his way across the field. “Why can’t I walk normally?”
“Idiot,” 167 muttered to his clone brother.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who claimed to be a Bionet expert,” 218 said.
The two snarled at each other while Skinner danced through the grass, added a pirouette, then strutted like a cowboy with saddle rash. “I hate this! I want my real legs back!”
The clones bickered all the way home, Skinner prancing and cursing behind them. At the cabin he gathered his belongings and stood with his left knee wobbling Elvis-like, as if preparing to perform the Electric Slide. The clones stood in front of him looking awfully embarrassed.
“You guys saved my life. I thank you for that.”
“Technically, the fishbot saved your life,” 167 said.
“Which reminds me. We gotta get that thing fixed,” said 218.
Skinner embraced the clones and asked them for directions to the Cascade Highway. They pointed him toward the logging road and with a nod, the old man duckwalked into the forest. Half an hour later the road intersected with the highway, and an hour after that he made it to the trailhead where his RV was parked. The mobile container of a previous life shocked him when he climbed into it, with its framed pictures and inert mementos. He put it in gear and stepped on the accelerator.
As Skinner stood in front of his daughter’s building his hand crawled inside his jacket to flip the safety on his Coca-Cola. He looked down and realized what his hand was doing. Shoppers entered the flower shop across the street, a cyclist coasted through the intersection; nothing external was awry. But there was his heart again, quickening under his ribs. Once inside the building he found himself sweating and had to stop at the landing of the first flight of stairs. He unholstered his Coke and proceeded. When he came to Roon and Dot’s floor he passed through what felt like an invisible heat blast of death. Panting, he kicked open the door of the condominium, firearm drawn.
Blood all over the place. Broken furniture. Pictures ripped off walls. A woman’s hand on the coffee table, palm up as if beckoning the owner to come back and claim it.
The kitchen. His daughter. Pots and pans.
Bedroom. Parts of bodies in the hallway. Bullet casings.
Skinner got to the bathroom and found the upper half of his wife in the bathtub, clutching a Bionet transmitter, and the lower half of her body sitting on the toilet. Her eyelids fluttered. He clutched her head and kissed her and wept. “Chiho, Chiho, Chiho.”
“Al?” Her voice scraped the word through his head.
“Tell me who did this.”
“You bastard.”
“Who were they—”
“Is it you? The old you? Which one of you are you?”
“Come on, old girl, we’ll fix you. Just hang on to that signal.”
“Oh Al, fuck you. I’m going to die.”
“I’m not going to let you leave me. No. Pull it together, soldier.”
“Why’d you do it, Al? Are you… are you still on a mission?”
“Where’s the boy?”
“Newmans. Alki.”
“I need you, Chiho. Don’t go.”
Staring straight ahead Chiho reached up to touch his face. “I loved you. That’s… the most fucked-up… part of this whole…”
“Okay. Okay, you go. You go, my love.”
Skinner reached into the tub and found the transmitter’s OFF switch, touched it, and was done.
Thirteen hours passed.
Dark outside. Sitting on the floor holding his dead wife’s hand, Skinner finally let go, picked up the transmitter, and typed in his code.
“Welcome! What can I do for you today?” the transmitter chirped.
“Make me combat-ready,” he said.
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 7
I checked into the New York–New York hotel and collected my thoughts for a week. I ordered room service, watched TV, and stared out the window at the Strip. I started going out, walking at night, along wide sidewalks littered with flyers for escort services. I passed among the drunk, the destitute, the horny, and the wealthy like I was the only one who knew a bomb was about to go off. Like someone out of the Bible in this titty bar wasteland. Inebriated bachelorettes howling through limo sun roofs turned into centaurs farting exhaust. Cigar smoke and sunscreen. A bride in a maternity wedding dress. The carnal desperation of neon. I considered my fellow human beings and thought that it wasn’t that we’d become animals, it’s that we’d always been animals. Watching a gang of fraternity boys muscling through a casino esplanade was like watching ancient tribesmen, all of them bent on mating after the kill. The women appeared to be fixated on two primary consumer goods—shoes and handbags—as if they lived in a long-forgotten civilization now survived only by its baskets and trinkets. I didn’t belong to these people. I didn’t feel better than them, I just felt alien. In fact, I saw how happy they appeared to be and I envied
